That’s why many Republicans want Obama to fail. At the moment they have no real ideas for governance through long-term policy on any of the issues they are eager to leave orphaned on the steps of Obama’s White House. What they have is an electoral strategy to blunt congressional support within two years and leave Obama hanging for the last two, ripe for a campaign to remove him on the basis of pain and unpopularity. This will not be possible if there is even the perception of success in Obama’s presidency.

It seems not to matter to this old guard that, given the stakes, a failed Obama presidency means economic calamity beyond the scale of the Great Depression. For one thing, many Americans survived that crisis because they still lived on a farm; lots of people knew how to grow food and raise livestock to feed themselves. They knew how to preserve edibles in jars and they lived in communities where a barter economy still functioned. They had no cash, but they didn’t need cash because they could farm for subsistence and trade with each other.

You probably know somebody who can tend a first rate garden. But I bet you know a lot more people who can’t even keep herbs alive in their windowsill. I wonder how many Americans have even the slightest interest in where their food comes from, other than from the shelf of a supermarket.

We have a cash or credit economy. Americans often get groceries with a Mastercard at a high interest rate. We borrow to eat.

Do you think this country is really ready for another Great Depression?

I recently visited the Herbert Hoover Museum in West Branch, Iowa, just outside of Iowa City. The experience provided some perspective on Hoover that I think also informs our current economic crisis. Perhaps no other president entered the White House more prepared to lead the country through the travails of his moment than Herbert Hoover. And I do not think even President Obama assumed the office under a burden of higher expectations.

Hoover was no Rockefeller, but his career as an engineer and international mining consultant had left him a wealthy man. In fact, Hoover and JFK were the only two presidents to refuse their salaries while in office. Also rich with the experience of vast world travel, Hoover’s success was embedded with a Quaker’s ambitions for service and generosity. In Europe at the outbreak of World War I, Hoover organized efforts to get stranded Americans home, and then stayed as Chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Back in America, Hoover became U.S. Food Administrator for President Wilson, and later the Director General of the American Relief Administration. During his tenure, 350 million people were fed in 21 countries. Hoover literally became famous for getting food, clothes and shelter to the desperate, so celebrated with admiration that he became known as The Great Humanitarian. He was widely championed as a possible presidential candidate in 1920, but when traditional political forces prevailed he served as Commerce Secretary for Harding and Coolidge, warning both of them about the treacherous volatility of an economy driven by Wall Street speculation. By 1928 Hoover was famous and trusted, winning the presidency in a landslide – the first time he had ever sought public office. Black Monday crashed the stock market eight months after his inauguration.

So how did the Great Humanitarian fail when his own citizens ended up in breadlines? How could this happen when Hoover had managed reconstruction and relief efforts so brilliantly in previous crises? I thought about this as I walked through the galleries of the museum.

Part of it was the difference between humanitarian administration and political management. One role is logistical, the role of an organizer. But political leadership requires convincing others to move in a certain direction. When you have direct control over the distribution of supplies, the task is more streamlined and less compromised than when you have to generate congressional support for public policy to address the structural problems that crashed the whole system. Hoover was always more progressive than most of his fellow Republicans in the congress. He initiated federal programs for farmers and veterans; he demonstrated a special concern for children’s health. Hoover was resisted every step of the way by his own party. In fact, he remained bitter for life that FDR later used many of his ideas and programs with support from a Democratic congress while maintaining that Hoover had been unresponsive to the crisis.

Part of Hoover’s failure was also philosophical. He never let go of his conviction that his previous success was based on his skills for organizing the service of volunteers. Hoover did not see government in the same way. The base of his party was certainly not interested in legislative activism. And in truth, the scope and complexity of the crash was completely beyond the experience of those who believed it was a market problem that would have to play itself out. FDR redefined the economy as a government problem, and the crisis provided the opportunity for him to change the relationship between the federal government, states, cities, and individuals. FDR also personalized the presidency, changing the expectations citizens had of the possibilities and limits of the office. Before FDR, the president was an administrator who “executed” the will of the congress. After FDR, the president’s role became savior in chief, and the only limit was being too fearful to act.

It was in FDR’s act of redefining government’s role in our lives -- and the president’s role in our psyche -- that Hoover’s reputation as a miserable failure was sealed. It is a great injustice of history that Herbert Hoover became so personally designated as the central element driving the depths of the Great Depression. Democrats established Hoover as a code word for conservative incompetence, intransigence, and insensitivity to human need, let the facts be damned. Democrats had established a sturdy coalition, and they were not going to mess around with a successful narrative.

Today’s GOP recognizes a political moment to do the same thing to President Obama. The strategy is plain. Republicans will establish themselves in resistance to Obama’s policies, knowing that whatever success the President has will only come through pain that Americans may not be willing to put up with for very long. It helps the GOP strategy that Obama has taken on huge structural policy problems like health care and the environment in the context of a banking crisis. Whatever happens will be ugly, expensive, transformative, and scary.

Crisis creates opportunity for boldness, and that works in Obama’s favor. Yet the experimental nature of Obama’s approach lends itself easily to blaming him for making things worse when it is clear that things will certainly get worse before they get better no matter who is in the White House. Thus what the Republicans have now is less a coherent set of policy alternatives than a narrative they can repeat while hoping that circumstances overwhelm Obama.

Republicans hope for Obama to fail because things will be so bad that Obama’s name will become code for liberal incompetence, intransigence, and hostility to capitalism.

But the hope for his failure is deeper than the story about his failure that Republicans hope to write into political memory.

Republicans know that if Obama is successful, or even perceived as a strong leader who stepped up to the crisis, then what will be shattered is the very politics that created the crisis. Obama will have managed to use the crisis to rewrite the narrative of political life as a story about transparency, post-partisanship, and public-spirited behavior.

FDR changed the story to put government, and those who championed its activist use, in the driver’s seat. Obama’s opportunity is to change the story in a way that empowers the citizenry itself, for Obama’s own story is bound inextricably with civic engagement.

We must transition from a debate about big versus small government to a debate about big versus small citizens.

This is the moment. American citizens can rewrite the idea of democracy. Politicians and pundits will try to wrap President Obama in the growing pains associated with his long-term policies, but the failures of democracy will be all of ours to own.